Logan Pauley awarded Scoville Fellowship

Logan Pauley ’15 has been awarded a prestigious Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellowship. He will spend six to nine months working with the Stimson Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that aims to enhance international peace and security.

Pauley is one of only three spring 2018 Scoville Fellows chosen from among 160 applicants who graduated from 104 U.S. universities. His expected projects include China’s changing influence in the international balance of power; China’s pattern on ceasefire mediation and intervention; and China’s role in Syria, Myanmar, North Korea and Af-Pak.

In addition, he was recently honored as one of the 2017 5 Under 25 Leaders in U.S.-China Relations by China Hands magazine, a publication devoted to discussions of China-related issues and U.S.-China relations.

Pauley’s interest in China had its start at Centre under the guidance and mentorship of Kyle Anderson who, during Pauley’s student years, was assistant professor of Chinese and now serves as director of the Center for Global Citizenship. Pauley spent the fall 2013 semester at the Centre-in-China study abroad program at Tongji University in Shanghai, and the preceding summer in an immersive experience at the International Chinese Language Program (ICLP) at National Taiwan University in Taiwan.

Also with Anderson’s support, he furthered his Asian studies as the only ambassador from the United States selected for the 2014 Harvard Project for Asian International Relations (HPAIR) conference. Past world leaders in attendance at HPAIR include such notables as the United Nations’ Secretary General, the president of South Korea, the president of Singapore and the president of Goldman Sachs Asia.

“I knew he was a young man who would take every opportunity for growth that was given to him,” Anderson says, “so I entrusted him to a number of foundations and institutions to pursue further studies and scholarships.”

“Being Kyle’s mentee has been my most meaningful educational relationship throughout this entire process,” Pauley says. “I’m not naturally a language learner, and I’m also a bit hardheaded, so Kyle really helped shape the way I think about learning, how to interact with people and how to approach new experiences. Seeing how Kyle approaches international experiences and being genuinely involved with a wide array of people really rubbed off on me and made me open to diving into awkward or uncomfortable situations, which in turn aided my language learning process.”

A case in point:

“I spent many nights outside on the streets in Taipei and Shanghai getting lost on midnight runs intentionally so I would have to ask old men eating at kebab stalls on the corner how to get home,” Pauley explains. “Similarly, seeing how Kyle truly embodies being a global citizen through work in Myanmar, Thailand and Europe has really inspired my branching out, leading to work with refugee resettlement based around Lebanon and Jordan, Syrian conflict and reconstruction research, and now attempting to incorporate more of the Middle East and South Asia into my China focus.”

Anderson says, “As an instructor, you pray for students like Logan: talented, teachable, dedicated and tenacious. I picked up on his potential immediately in my entry-level Chinese language course and began to work on him, pushing and challenging. No breaks and no excuses. He never backed down, developing a strong internal motivation for excellence, and internalizing a desire to be his best.”

Pauley earned a master’s degree in international politics from the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies (HNC), for which he wrote and defended a 100+ page thesis, all in Mandarin. While there, he was a Microsoft Fellow, Hassenfeld Fellow, Future Leader Fellow and Nanjing City Scholarship recipient.

“I had very little professional experience going into graduate school, having spent my summers at Centre studying Mandarin,” Pauley says. “So while at the HNC, I tried to do an internship in every field to get a feel for what disparate industries do and where I would fit in. To that end, I worked as a foreign policy analyst with the State Department, a consultant with KPMG, a Big-4 consulting firm, a researcher with an NGO that worked closely with the UN, and ran the China bureau of Johns Hopkins’ graduate school newspaper. Having the opportunity to blend all of the experiences together afforded an opportunity to see how the language and soft skills I had gained from Centre translated into varied professional contexts.”